32 | Out in the Mountains |0ctober 2000 T-.a&e= It Doesn’t Happen Every Day REVIEW BY CAROLYN ASHBY A packed Ira Allen Chapel was recently treated toa fantas- tic show by not one, but two, luminaries of the women’s folk music scene. Dar Williams and Catie Curtis opened a tour sup- porting their brand new CDs in Burlington. The UVM Women’s Center co-sponsored the -benefit concert for the Peace & Justice Center. Both artists loaded their sets with new music, slipping in old favorites at the perfect moments. Curtis is accompanied only by Jimmy Ryan on mandolin on tour. The Burlington open- ing is a homecoming of sorts for both: Ryan lived in Burlington for eight years; Curtis played the Burlington Coffeehouse years ago when she still had a day job. A story and a song, “Slave to my Belly,” got the audience laughing and hooked in. Curtis’ upbringing in Saco, Maine, provided inspiration for several other highlight songs, including one week-old tune that posed questions of faith using the story of a small-town church burned to the ground and stunning images like “pieces of molten Jesus at my feet.” The complex questions and utter simplicity of life are the perennial topics of her songs; the spare folk style of her set, accompanied by rip- pling mandolin, was the perfect backdrop. On her new album, A Crash‘ Course in Roses, Curtis opted for a more lush sound with fuller instrumentation. Where past albums paired introspec- tion and emotional reaching out with guitar and subtle back- up, the new bounce on this album amplifies the helping hand and positive perspective in the face of difficulties offered in her lyrics. A more rock-like energy lends different flavor to subtle lyrical pictures. In “World Don’t Owe Me,” she sings “the world don’t owe me a highway, don’t owe me a .train, the world don’t owe me an easy way out,” while the music evokes the rhythm of the speeding car or train carrying the pain away. The image of movement, travel and the corresponding rest of home, both real and within one’s self and relation- ships, carries throughout. In “Magnolia Street,” a night’s drive with a first love—”l knew that I loved you the first time you got in my car... I felt a hush come over me in the dark”——so changes life that home is “not the one I’ve known.” Those intimate moments that make up the memories of life sparkle throughout, particularly in “I00 Miles” and “Burn Your Own House Down.” It is these “little struggles, little glories” that she juxtapos- es to what she sees in the out- side world in “Wise to the Ways.” In Vermont this year, we, too, have recognized “The one that cries out... claiming to be righteous, claiming devout/Saying everything except what it’s about” and the response: “There’s so much coming at us now... If I said what I should say/I would be screaming.” “What’s the Matter,” with harmony vocals by Melissa Ferrick and Jennifer Kimball, formerly of The Story, is also particularly fitting. Curtis introduced it in concert by informing the audience that she was “very pleased to hear about the civil union legisla- tion.” Based in her own experi- ence, it tells a story familiar to far too many GLBT youth, “This town was my biggest fan/’Til I was who I am.” In a town where “you can see the stars at night,” the question is posed‘: “Why be afraid of this girl?... Why be afraid of this world?” Conversations around album at the concert. Add to the mix her rollicking “homage to therapy” “What Do You Hear in These Sounds?,” solo renditions of “The Babysitter’s Here,” and same—sex-couple- affirmative “The Christians and the Pagans,” and Williams’ signature quirky commentary, all leading up to a floor-pound- ing demand for encores. Williams’ new album con- tains a wealth of snapshots-in- song with the added depth of a growing maturity and a theme that weaves the album together. 7 The Green World is rooted in a concept Williams culled from a college Shakespeare class. In the “closed world” of Elizabethan England’s court, “the green world was different. It was unpredictable and chaot- ic. It was an unmediated place, literally represented by the for- est, where you learned things you don’t necessarily want to know about yourself.” The convergence of that wild side of the world with the more day- to-day one we most often live in permeates each song. In “We Learned the Sea,” a ballad- shanty mix, an eight-year sea captain brings back her story of a wild tempest: “I sang in the wind as if God was beside me.” “Playing to the Firmament,” which opens with a drum and organ sequence reminiscent of ABBA, of all things (well, that’s what it brings up for me, anyway), urges us to hold on to a child’s sense of play “’cause the world is too green for all this bad driving. What’s the rush? Dip your brush into this twilight.” “Spring Street” juxtaposes the temptation to live what Williams calls the “franchised coffee experience” or “Bohemia, Inc.” with" its “storefront daisies floating on their neon stems” with the nec- essary courage to chase the real “spring green life dream.” However, settling for bath beads, scented candles, and include answers to fear just like this one: “What if I am Black or Jew/Straight or queer mother of two.... I love this town.... I’ve got something to give.” the State F"°bab‘Y {3AI’?.' ’+fi.<’§1L;Lt.§3. has Dar Williams’ onstage presence more closely mir- rors the feel of her new album, The Green World. In fact, she playedall but one of the songs from that 't;1i.e- great wt;:s':~1it. Catie Curtis & Dar Williams Ira Allen Chapel, Burlington September 14, 2000 ' “personal growth, inc.” won’t get you to the green world and back with its necessary lessons. “But I’ll push myself up through the dirt and shake my petals free, I’m resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery.” After a bout of real personal growth, Williams her- self recently chose small-town" upstate New York over the bus- tle of SoHo. At the show, Williams intro- duced “And A God Descended” by talking about “the soft spot in [her] heart for the kind of person who ends up in” a cult and her recurring dreams of becoming a sexy cult deprogrammer—“a sort of X- Files meets Touched by an ' Angel.” The lyrics dig deeper into crossing that line into a wilder kind of faith and the struggle afterward to “live with A Crash Course in Roses Catie Curtis Rykodisc The Green World Dar Williams Razor & Tie saw.” Well-placed recurring images of shards of glass con- vey a sense of shattered truth and broken reality. Each song has its own story. Activists struggle for ‘peace in the midst of awar culture in “I Had No Right” (dedicated in concert to “the folks at the Peace & Justice Center, who often do their work in obscuri- ty, but always with grace”). Up-beat toe-tapper “Another Mystery” is a plea for intimacy over the mystery of catwalk what we did with what we §$*g"”3E Over 200,000 book, music, video & DVD titles Over 2,000 periodicals ® 30% discount on Borders best-sellers; B ' . 4 M0“dW_Su““duv orders Best CD‘trt|es, $0.99 and up Mondays” d %m_\\pm Most Extensive Music selection in Burlington! 90%” ur ay Suntlnv 90m-9l““ Over 500 music listening stations to preview CD5 Sunday fimirgpm lg B O R D E R S® @ 29 CHURCH STREET MARKETPLACE ' BURLINGTON -° 802-865-271 I . §,*V..__..V ;— —__....-- —- ‘v%— —- -‘.4